Deeper Than The Moon
by Tabitha Dornoc
Summary: [oneshot, SakuraxYue] Told in 50 themed sentences, shedding grief and old love for new, with pesky doubts and uncertainty getting in the way. Does not disregard canon pairings.


**Written for the 1sentence lj comm. **

**Disclaimer: **Characters belong to the insanely taletened women of CLAMP.

**Warnings: **I play with canon a bit, unfortunately, in that some is taken from the anime (the cards) and some the manga (hopefully everything else). When I first started on CCS, someone expressed the idea to me that because Clow lived so long, so would Sakura, and since then, I've never been able to picture it any other way.

**Additional Warnings:** Sap sap sap sap sap. Also comma abuse.

**Deeper Than The Moon**

**#01 - Motion**

She grew in height, mind, age and grace over the years, and sometimes, when he is not being truly careful, he forgets that she no longer bounds from room to room with an all encompassing smile that her ten-year-old self did, and sometimes he forgets to not miss it.

**#02 - Cool**

His distance used to unsettle her as a child, but now it warms her heart and mind because at least it's a constant.

**#03 - Young**

She stopped aging before she turned thirty, and the only changes to her face in the centuries that passed was a quiet acceptance and weariness that would creep into her eyes when Kero or Yue weren't there to chase it away.

**#04 - Last**

Syaoran had been her first kiss, lover, partner, but had been her last love; Yukito was her first, and her heart tended to not let her disregard that.

**#05 - Wrong**

She is his Master, and he's not supposed to feel that heavy pressure in his chest when she smiles at him; at least, he's not supposed to feel it and equate it to how Yukito felt when Touya was near.

**#06 - Gentle**

"Yue," a gentle admonish, "won't you call me Sakura; just Sakura?"

**#07 - One**

"Syaoran was my One," she murmurs to Keroberos, his large lion head resting in her lap, hoarding her fingers for a late night petting, "And I hate myself for letting him die before me," and he only answers by asking "Who is your Two?"

**#08 - Thousand**

One thousand months after Syaoran's slow death, Sakura travels the continent to where he rests in China, and she kisses the weathered stone and brushes her fingers into the worn lettering, apologising and saying, "Enough, enough now."

**#09 - King**

"Checkmate," she says mournfully, as Yue topples over his trapped chess piece, and Sakura allows herself to glare at him across the board before adding, "Next time, Yue, I forbid you from letting me win," and she is rewarded with the sight of mild panic in deep violet eyes.

**#10 - Learn**

"Sa-Ku-Ra," she begins to enunciate every time he approaches her with the address Master on his lips, but the moon is a creature of habit, and Yue doesn't learn any better.

**#11 - Blur**

Though she decided to shed her grief over lost family and love, Time still presses on her; she has a card to turn back the hour, and a card to pause it, but there is none in her arsenal that will let Time fly so fast that background blends and blurs, and she will not create one because she knows she would abuse it.

**#12 - Wait**

Decade after decade, she stays in her father's house (it will always be his in her mind) perfecting and creating magic, until one day, Keroberos nudges her palm with his nose and he says, "You're allowed to live while you wait," (wait for the End, he means), which earns him a smile, so he adds, "You're also allowed to make me some cakes," which earns him an affectionate smack.

**#13 - Change**

He's been her Kero-chan for so so many years, that he notices the change before either of them do; the way her hand unconsciously lingers on Yue's arm when they speak, the way she smiles at him more brilliant than magic, and the worst, the way he is beginning to smile back.

**#14 - Command**

"Be careful you don't command him to love you, Sakura," he advises her one night, and she is innocently startled, because Sakura doesn't know that she could order an army to their knees with one upturn of lip.

**#15 - Hold**

She realises herself that she's in trouble on a casually cold April day, when walking in her garden with Yue as company, she notices their hands somehow became interlocked, and while surely she must have been the one to initiate, he certainly wasn't releasing her hold.

**#16 - Need**

"I need your help," Sakura confesses, waiting patiently for Eriol (fumbling with his robe and glasses, blinking sleep from eyes) to invite her in, and he says, "Sakura... it's three in the morning."

**#17 - Vision**

Eriol spills his hot English tea down his front when she looks at him so closely she might be looking _through_ him and says "Please Look into my future... because I'm too afraid to do it myself."

**#18 - Attention**

He listens with the most rapt attention he's ever spared to his Heir in Magic while she stumbles verbally over what she feels for Yue and how afraid she is of what the guardian might return, and while sipping refilled tea he wonders just when he became matchmaker to century old magicians.

**#19 - Soul**

"The guardians were made in mind for when after Clow died; Keroberos' soul was modeled after Clow's himself, but Yue's... Sakura, Yue's was made for _you_."

**#20 - Picture**

When Sakura touches ground from her flight (by the very wings on her back) from England to Japan, she is greeted with the same image as when she suddenly left; Yue, tall and imposing and hiding every shred of worry that is worn on his sleeve anyway.

**#21 - Fool**

"She is acting too strangely, I think," Yue says that night to his companion, and Keroberos almost laughs, but instead pushes the discarded Joker from Sakura's abandoned solitaire game to Yue, and grins at his own cleverness.

**#22 - Mad**

He knows now, and she knows he knows, because Keroberos admits to telling him, and he can feel her anger and upset thrumming through the very magic in his skin, and he finds it fascinating before he remembers what she's so upset about.

**#23 - Child **

He can't love her in return, because she is his master (that did not stop you from loving Clow), because Touya would hate him (for hurting his sister), and and and she's just a chi- and he can taste the lie of it before the word is even formed fully.

**#24 - Now **

Everything is on his shoulders Now; his choice to speak, his chance to respond, his duty to simple _react_ in some way, and Yue learns that he much prefers Then.

**#25 - Shadow**

Sakura gains a second shadow in the few days after Keroberos confessed her feelings, a shadow that hovers on wide wings and refuses to meet her eyes, but she can't bring herself to be annoyed because she knows he's just Thinking.

**#26 - Goodbye**

His answer to her confession is 'Goodbye' and the Sakura Book gains a crescent moon on its back cover.

**#27 - Hide**

"He's hiding," Kero says, small and sitting on her shoulder, a form he rarely uses now, though one that is very good for comforting; but even small stubbed arms hugging her neck doesn't take the bite of loneliness and worry from her as her fingers stroke her Book over and over.

**#28 - Fortune**

She remembers how accurate her first reading with ten cards was when Mirror was terrorizing Tomoeda, so with a steady hand and mind, she begins to shuffle her fifty-three.

**#29 - Safe**

First card is The Sleep (in dreams he hides), second The Dash (away from her), The Shield, The Lock, The Hope (safe, he is safe) and lastly The Return (soon); it is enough.

**#30 - Ghost**

While Yue sleeps in page, Sakura dreams of the dead; her father who says nothing but folds her in his arms, of Syaoran who says "Loving another doesn't make you love me less", and of Touya who says "Stupid _kaijuu_, just kiss him".

**#31 - Book**

She follows her brother's advice (from the grave it sounds much more practical than it ever did in life) and summons Yue from the book, greeting the humbled guardian with neither word or smile but a small step forward and the quietest, simplest meeting of lips.

**#32 - Eye**

Keroberos slinks out of the room without being told, because there are some things simply not healthy for Sun guardian's eyes.

**#33 - Never**

After Clow, Yue swore Never Again, but Sakura doesn't quite believe in Never, and where she goes, he now knew, he would _always_ follow.

**#34 - Sing**

Yue remembers, vaguely and second-handedly, what it was like to kiss Touya, so he is not truly prepared for what it feels like when she kisses him strongly, deeply, and the very magic that feeds him sings along veins to that one focal point where lips join lips.

**#35 - Sudden**

For one wild, sudden moment there is the sense that it is too much and too fast, and maybe they can't breathe and should just take a simple pause to allow the world to regain its footing and balance.

**#36 - Stop**

They don't.

**#37 - Time**

When they finally _do _stop for a single terrifying moment of quiet and stillness, it's as if time has frozen around them, and, blushing, Sakura realizes it _has_, so returns the unconsciously summoned Time card to its book.

**#38 - Wash**

It's simple to exaggerate and say one's emotions wash over the other; but Yue's very existence and being are tied so intrinsically to Sakura's life and magic, that it quite literally does.

**#39 - Torn**

The silence that creeps in, making home between and around them while they wait for the other to act or speak is heavy, because everything that they once were has been systematically torn apart and resewn into a pleasant offering for the Inevitable.

**#40 - History**

It's the past that remains like settled dust in their minds and hearts, halting them; Syaoran's ghost will never fully sleep, and Clow's denial will always linger.

**#41 - Power**

The final lock, that precious final wall that gives way to temptation, is torn when Yue realises that as his Master she has the authority to order him in any way, that she has the power to rework his being to her satisfaction... she doesn't (she couldn't; she is Sakura) but it is enough to know, and he takes a step forward past the line of never turning back.

**#42 - Bother**

His hand reaches out and clasps her own, and it feels like ordinary touch of skin against skin, though of course it is so much more, so much that he must ask, "Does it bother you?".

**#43 - God**

"Gods, no," is her answer.

**#44 - Wall**

One expects flowers to bloom and stars to fall from their homes in the sky when she looks in his eyes and says, "I have always loved you", but there is only the feeling of the four walls crashing in on them and being pressed tight... but that could just be the feel of her arms around him.

**#45 - Naked**

He knew, of course, but her spoken confession makes him feel stripped naked, and that shameless imp in her smile hints she wouldn't mind a bareness far more literal.

**#46 - Drive**

It's so base and _human _that Yue doesn't know what to do with the ever growing drive to lickkisstouchabsorb Sakura but if he does, then... Yue stops thinking, he does it too much, and places his lips to her forehead without her beckon or permission; it tastes like sugar-soaked freedom.

**#47 - Harm**

She sighs in his embrace, leaning cheek to chest, and the tentative voice that tries to whisper to him _she could hurt you like Clow, just like Clow _is broken and silenced by the whisper of his name on her lips, over and over, in time with the beats of his heart at her ear.

**#48 - Precious**

And he knows then, that she would not gain his love then shorn it, as his first master had, because, to her, he is not the most precious creation in his magic career, but the most precious of friends, and the difference between stretches beyond infinity.

**#49 - Hunger**

"I waited so long," and it's not quite clear which one of them say it as arms wrap around neck or waist, then a twist of legs entwining, and a desperate, hungry murmur that is from the other, and it's impossible to keep eyes open against this delicious inevitable.

**#50 - Believe**

She has an invincible spell she keeps solid faith in, and knows it will hold, because that morning when she wakes in folded wings, Yue whispers not the three words all girls wait to hear, but three syllables worth so much more; Sa-Ku-Ra.


End file.
